"Uncle Tom['s Cabin] may all be found in our own tracts!" ——
A Wesleyan preacher, quoted in the Christian Inquirer (1853)

"From the most ignorant and wretched of mankind we are furnished with some of the finest
illustrations of the power of truth and grace." —— Black Peter (1842)

American Tract Societies

As Jane Tompkins notes, the American Tract Society was "the first organization in America to publish
and distribute the printed word on a mass scale."* Along with groups like the American Sunday School Union (publisher of the first two texts
below), it printed millions of copies of hundreds of pamphlets and books during the 19th century. On this page is a sampling of those
works, including one by Stowe herself.
The typical tract was bound in paper, about 36 pages long, and often included woodcuts, signs that they were mainly intended
for younger or lower class readers. Many, like four of the ones here, tell the story of a non-white "heathen" brought
to God, as a testament to the fact that Jesus died to save all mankind, regardless of color, as an admonitory
example to white Christians who neglect their faith, and as a more or less subtly worded appeal for funds to support missionaries. There is a lot of repetition in the stories tracts tell, but in a sense
that is the point: that wherever one looks — into one's heart, at the landscape, in the Bible or the words of a hymn,
among all the classes and colors people are found in — there is one great story being told: that God is, and will
redeem the faithful from sin. Thus while instances of social injustice are often mentioned, the wrongs of this temporal
and transient world pale
before the promise of the everlasting home that lies in the world beyond.